Shutdown hurts American cybersecurity, panel warns

The government shutdown has imperiled American cybersecurity at a time when the country can least afford to be disrupted and disorganized, some of the country’s top cyber experts and advocates warned Tuesday.

“To think we would take a pause, a step back in cyber — the Russians and the Chinese are licking their chops at the thought of that,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), who appeared at POLITICO’s Cyber 7 event in Washington.

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POLITICO’s Cyber 7 event

Chambliss on shutdown: Critical point now till January

The government shutdown has meant furloughs for Defense Department, intelligence community and other employees who play an essential role in defending U.S. computer networks. Although some of them are coming back to their jobs this week, Chambliss and his fellow panelists blasted the risks involved with the shutdown as well as the time and energy wasted on the political battles in the Capitol.

“There’s an opportunity cost involved here,” said Chris Finan, a former White House cybersecurity director now with the Truman National Security Project. There are other things Congress should be doing, he argued — reforming immigration or modernizing the education system, not “trying to relitigate old legislative battles.”

In the meantime, Washington is losing ground, he warned. Finan described trying to check on the progress of the White House’s executive order on cybersecurity.

“I went online to look at the most recent draft before I came here, and the website was unavailable because of the shutdown,” he said.

Chambliss agreed, lamenting that cybersecurity has been “crowded off the list” of congressional priorities for the rest of the year — a list, he said, that was getting ever more crowded and complicated as the calendar wears on.

“Once we get to January, everybody knows it’s an election year and things tend to fall off the table,” Chambliss said. “The critical point of time is between now and the end of the year.”

If Washington knuckles down, he said, it still might be able to get a “big deal” that reopens the government, reforms taxes and entitlements and unshackles the Pentagon from sequestration — but it’s unclear how many more members of Congress share that view.

Whatever happens politically over the rest of the year, the cyberthreat is already dangerous and becoming more so, the panelists said. Richard Bejtlich, chief security officer of Mandiant, said there has been no letup in the Chinese hacking threats that his company tracks, nor any shortage of dedication by Beijing to continue to try to exploit American and international networks.

“Chinese state media has said they have 2 million people dedicated to censoring the Internet,” Bejtlich said. If China is willing to dedicate that kind of firepower to patrolling its own networks, he said, it almost certainly is willing to use the same or more to interfere with foreign ones.